Dell first showed us the Mini 5 at CES this year, but it was a quiet affair. The five-inch tablet has all the trappings of a smartphone in a much bigger package and at a much higher price tag. With the iPad announcement, the Dell’s tablet looks out of place, and it has to get a whole lot cheaper before anyone will take it seriously.

In case you didn’t hear about it (a lot of people didn’t), the Mini 5 is a thousand dollar slate running Android 1.6. As far as I can tell it’s about an iPhone and a half in terms of size. The device has a 5 megapixel camera, Bluetooth and 3G support, all running on a 1GHz Snapdragon. In terms of specs, it’s pretty comparable to the iPad, but look at that price tag. $1,000? For that? Really the only improvement it makes over the iPad is that camera, which is definitely not worth $500. You could argue that Android is the key here, but 1.6? What is this, 2009?

According to TechPulse, Michael Dell has confirmed the launch of his company’s first Android phone, the mini 3i, for 2010. The device is rumored to be coming to AT&T and should see a hardware upgrade from the version available in China, namely to add Wi-Fi and 3G support. Smart move, Dell. Launching a phone without those things would just put me over the edge.

The phone wasn’t all that well received when Dell first started shopping the thing around, and it doesn’t look like things have improved. Of course, it’s pretty hard for people to get excited about what looks to be an iPhone/Pre mashup running on Android. If anything had a shot at the iPhone in recent days it was the Pre because Palm had some pretty clear differentiators. Dell doesn’t have that. What it does have, though, is the pure gall to call underwhelming product releases an attempt at competition in essentially every market the company takes part in. As I’ve said before, this will be one long, agonizing death.

I hate to call netbooks a section of the PC market. They’re just laptops. Small laptops. That’s all. The world’s great surprise at the success of the netbook makes as little sense to me as defining these little laptops as their own section of the market does. We’re in a recession and the machines are cheap. It’s also not a secret that computers usually deliver more than most consumers ever need. Smaller, less-powerful laptops are a welcome deviation from that course. So why is Michael Dell bashing the tiny PCs?

Speaking at a dinner party in Silicon Valley last night, Dell said user excitement with netbooks lasts all of 36 hours. Dell says users long for their larger screens, their bigger keyboards, shortly after the netbook thrill passes. “We see a fair amount of customers not really being that satisfied with the smaller screen and the lower performance, unless it’s like a secondary machine or it’s (a) very first machine and the expectations are low,” said Dell. “But as a replacement machine for an experienced user, it’s not what we’d recommend. It’s not a good experience, and we don’t see users very happy with those.”

It’s a strange sentiment from the CEO of a company that has a full line of netbooks for sale. Apparently this was Dell’s way of saying his company can give a customer options, that it can meet any need. As Don Reisinger at CNet pointed out, netbook sales have gone up 264% in Q2 over last year, while notebook sales dropped 14%. Mr. Dell would likely do well to consider those numbers when making sweeping statements about the future of the computer market.

Dell let employees at its Winston-Salem plant know to expect cuts in March of this year. What the company didn’t say was that the whole plant was in danger. Today Dell announced it would be closing the plant, eliminating more than 900 jobs from the NC market.

As a new resident of NC I can vouch for the state as a reflection of how truly awful the job market is all over the country. But Dell was struggling long before the economy went down the shitter, so this isn’t a huge surprise. The Winston-Salem plant was responsible for desktop production, a slice of the market that’s quickly headed the way of the dodo.

Source: CNet

I made a post a couple days ago about the downright zany information leaks about an upcoming MID from Dell. Employee comments were all over the place, which made it hard to figure out if Dell has been blowing particles of mercury through their air ducts or if they’re just panicking over their slippery market share. There’s more news this week, which has me leaning toward the mercury theory. I’ll start with the least crazy of the two.

Yesterday Dell announced a new option for their popular Mini line of netbooks: the Wireless 700 card. The card adds $69 to the price and adds GPS capability to your handy little netbook. Alan Sicher, senior wireless product manager at Dell, had this to say:

Smartphones already have GPS capabilities. We are now bringing it to…

Okay, stop. Yes. Smartphones already have GPS. So why are you putting it on netbooks? More and more phones, smart or otherwise, are adding GPS capabilities every day, with increasingly robust feature lists. Sorry I interrupted.

We are now bringing it to netbooks so the devices know where you are and can help you where you want to go.

Alright, stop. I’m going to cannibalize an old photographer’s saying for the sake of argument here. The best GPS is the one you have with you. Why would I want to carry a netbook when my phone can do what you’re suggesting? Can you imagine walking around downtown with your netbook out? People would wonder if you’d found Zack Morris’ old smartphone.
Read the rest of this entry »